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California Market owner Richard Rhee returns fire at looters approaching his market in Koreatown, Los Angeles on the second day of the Los Angeles Riots.

A Korean grocers organisation in LA has sued a black activist for saying that Korean shopkeepers sold blacks “stale bread and bad meat and wilted vegetables”.

LOS ANGELES – A Korean grocers’ group sued former U.N. ambassador Andrew Young for libel for claiming that they and other market owners “ripped off” blacks.

The suit, filed last week in Los Angeles County Superior Court, also names the Wal-Mart store chain and seeks at least $7.5 million in damages.

The former Atlanta mayor resigned as head of a Wal-Mart advocacy group on Aug. 18 amid controversy over comments he made to the weekly, black-owned Los Angeles Sentinel.

In an interview, Young said that Wal-Mart competition had forced smaller, “mom-and-pop” stores out of his neighborhood.

“But you see, those are the people who have been overcharging us, selling us stale bread and bad meat and wilted vegetables,” Young said. “And they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they’ve ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it’s Arabs; very few black people own these stores.”

He apologized later.

The libel suit was filed by the California Korean American Grocery Retailer Association.

“Most members are very upset,” said Gene Park, the association’s secretary and owner of a liquor store in Los Angeles. “There is no evidence that members sold those kinds of spoiled items. … If people think we charge higher prices or sell bad food, they won’t come in anymore.”

Korean shopkeepers were also major targets of rioters during the 1992 LA riots. Did ideas like this contribute to it? I dont know if Korean shopkeepers are charging more or not, but if they do, is it not fair compensation for doing business in a dangerous area? If I find a shops prices are too high, I simply shop elsewhere. I dont really see what the problem is here. Maybe someone can tell me.

Occidentalism has been nominated for best Korea blog in the Asia Blog Awards. Of course, Occidentalism is one of many that are being nominated, as you can see below.

Of course, voting for yourself just isn’t sporting, so I will be voting for Jodi from the Asiapages, who is very deserving of winning an award. If you think that Occidentalism is a worthwhile blog, go ahead and vote for it. Darin, Gerry and myself appreciate just being nominated, however.

The son of a couple in New Zealand was charged for ‘stealing’ his mothers car. The couple encouraged the judge to have their son sent to jail to teach him a lesson about “breaking the law as an adult” (the son was 17, a legal minor). From www.stuff.co.nz –

A violent gang member with a string of convictions is suspected of killing teenager Liam Ashley, who was strangled to death in a prison van cage.

The parents of 17-year-old Liam thought some time behind bars might teach their youngest son to take responsibility for his actions. But he never made it to the prison cells.

Liam was fatally assaulted on Thursday afternoon in the Chubb security van that was transporting him between North Shore District Court and Auckland Central Remand Prison.

Liam was facing a charge of unlawfully taking his mother’s car – his parents encouraged the court to remand him in custody.

Liam was transported in a van with 13 other prisoners. The van was divided into four separate compartments and the teenager was in a compartment with two other men.

The Sunday Star-Times understands one of the men is a known violent gang member with about 80 convictions.

The 25-year-old is understood to be a King Cobra member with convictions including firearms offences, escaping police custody and aggravated robbery.

A Corrections Department source told the Star-Times that at the man’s last court appearance, for aggravated robbery and wounding with intent, he had to be accompanied by four armed guards because of a history of violence and unpredictability.

When the van arrived at Auckland remand prison, Liam was unconscious and not breathing.

The Star-Times understands the markings on Liam’s neck suggest he was strangled with handcuffs.

Ambulance officers resuscitated him but the brain damage was so severe he was placed on life support in Auckland Hospital.

His family made the heartbreaking decision to turn the life support system off on Friday morning.

‘Tough love’ is something a family does in extreme circumstances, and it never should involve leaving a family member to the state. Any interaction with the prison system is bound to make the situation worse.

Liam’s uncle, Brett Ashley, said the family was devastated.

“Liam was offered bail but at his court hearing his family decided the best course of action was to entrust Liam to the New Zealand justice system and let him experience first- hand the serious effects of breaking the law as an adult.

“Liam was going through the process, being put through the system to get back on track and during that process he has ended up dead.”

The system does not ‘cure’ anyone. You cannot just process a human being through ‘the system’, and expect a good result.

Liam’s parents, Ian and Lorraine Ashley, met police yesterday. The family issued a statement saying they wanted the Corrections Department to explain why Liam was allowed to die in the care of the justice system.

The system does not ‘care’. The fundament of the system is a monopoly on violence, and the prison system is the epitome of that. What on earth did they expect? Boys town?

The New Zealand Herald made it clear that it was the parents, not the police, that decided to press charges, and then to not bail him out.

Yesterday, Liam’s parents Ian and Lorraine Ashley, confirmed it was their decision to press criminal charges against their son after he took their vehicle without permission.

Liam had been offered bail on the theft charge, but his parents decided he should spend some time behind bars and experience “the serious effects of breaking the law”.

In any encounter with the authorities, like the police or correctional system, your first priority is to survive the encounter. In a way, it might be that this boy was lucky. Actually entering the prison system, he may have been the victim of homosexual rape regularly, which so many young men suffer in the prison system. All this for the non-crime of ‘stealing’ his mothers car (which I am assuming he brought back). Yes, he was being a naughty boy, possibly delinquent in doing that, but you do not deliberately put your flesh and blood through a violent system in the hope that at the end they will ‘reform’. The parents will no doubt be looking to blame the state for this, but I think they have even more responsibility than the state. The state is what it is – it cannot be otherwise, but the parents job is to protect their son.

The Korean map posted below is called Cheonggudo. It was made in 1834 by a Korean named Kim Jeong-ho. It is the largest of Korea’s old maps still in existence. It is 8.7 meters tall and 4.62 meters wide.

The map is made up of hundreds of individual sheets of ruled paper panels. It is twenty-two panels wide and twenty-nine panels high.

The height of each panel represents a unit measure of 100 ri, and the width represents a unit measure of seventy ri. That means that the map represents measures of about 3,000 ri from north to south and about 1,500 ri from east to west. One ri is normally quoted as being 0.4 kilometers, but there seem to be shorter measures, as well.

The scale of the map is about 1/216,000th of actual size.

Each panel has a 10-segment rule for the height and a 7-segment rule for the width. Each segment represents a distance of ten ri.

Two panels are used to represent Ulleungdo.

On the small island next to Ulleungdo are written the Chinese characters 于山 (Usan). The scale of the map shows that Usan (Usando) is about 10 ri, offshore of Ulleungdo. That would be about four kilometers. By the way, the text below Usan reads as follows:

“In the 11th year of Yeongjo (1735), Gangwon Provincial Governor Jo Choi-su reported to the king, ‘A survey of Ulleungdo has found that the land is wide and fertile, and there are signs that people have lived there. Also, to its west is Usando, which is also wide and spacious.’ The so-called “west” character is different on this map, where (Usando) is to the east.”

Koreans claim that Usan (Usando) was the old name for present-day “Dokdo” (Liancourt Rocks), but the Japanese claim that it was Jukdo, which is a small island less than four kilometers off the east coast of Ulleungdo. Since “Dokdo” is ninety-two kilometers southeast of Ulleungdo, it seems obvious that Usan (Usando) was not “Dokdo.” In fact, it looks like the Japanese claim that it was Ulleungdo’s neighboring island of Jukdo (Chukdo) is correct.

You can see Jukdo (Chukdo) off the east coast of Ulleungdo on the modern map posted above.

Since Usan (Usando) was obviously not present-day “Dokdo” (Liancourt), that means Korea has no historical maps or documents to show that she even knew about Liancourt Rocks before the Japanese incorporated them in 1905. Korean claims on Liancourt Rocks (Dokdo) are based on lies and half-truths, which means Korea is illegally occupying Japanese territory.

You can find more discussion on the topic of “Dokdo or Takeshima?” here.

By the way, “Opp” provided the overlay and animation for the 7th map. You can find more of his work here and here.

All I have to say is – thank God I’m not an English teacher. I’m not saying this because I think the job itself is bad. I’m just saying that Korean society – in the media, on the news, at the water cooler – seems to have a new badguy. I think I’d rather introduce myself these days as the old “bad guy” – the American GI – than say I’m “an English teacher from Canada.” Now, that’s saying a lot.

And –

3) Delink the unrelated issues of A) teachers who have illegal sexual relations with underage students, B) teachers who have inappropriate (but legal) sexual relations with adult students, and C) adult foreigners who have sexual relations with adult Koreans who are not even their students (wild Hongdae parties or stupid foreigners who go on TV and say they slept with 2,000 women are just sensationalist and ridiculous stories). If you separate A, B, and C, you’ll quickly realize that what the newspapers are talking about is mostly B and C, but are trying to make it SEEM like there is a lot of A going on, when in fact, I haven’t heard of any cases of A involving foreign teachers at all.

One of the Taiwanese kids that had victory stolen from him because Koreans could not handle being beaten by foreigners

A Taiwanese Kids baseball team that was invited to play in Korea proved to be too strong for the Korean teams, so the Korean organisers decided to snatch what was a likely victory from the hands of the Taiwanese kids team, and forbade them from playing in the final 4. From ETtoday News –

The kids from Taizhong Lixing Private School baseball team was invited by the organisers of a kids baseball tournament in Korea and went to Korea, and overcame barriers to get into the top 8. After the the Koreans said that only Koreans will be allowed to win, and they were not allowed to play anymore. The reason the Korean side gave was that “victory is reserved for a Korean team”. They returned to Taiwan despondent.

The Taiwanese team played very well in Korea the earlier this month, they beat the other team in the first round finishing early with a stunning victory of 20:0, making everyone surprised. They finally got into top 8, but nobody believed that korea would stop them to keep playing when it really looked like they could win.

Teacher zhang for the Tainwanese team said that “they were scared we would win, because the winners trophy belongs to their country, so they talked to us, and only allowed us to play until top 4, forbidding us to continue beyond that”.

Not allowing the overseas team to play final round made the Taiwanese coach very angry, and he got into a scuffle with the organisers. However, the complaint still did not work, and kids had to withdraw from the final and leave Korea sad.

This trip to korea, planned to be 20 days, and the personal expense was as high as 30000 Taiwanese dollars for each kid, which was a heavy price for their parents to pay, but they still got this unreasonable treatment from korea.

The kids in the Taiwanese team said “the Koreans are wierd, they dont want to allow us to win, it’s unreasonable”. Having been kicked out of the tournament, all the Taiwanese players got really angry. They said they only want to communicate using their playing skill with the Korean teams. But they will keep playing hard after they get back to Taiwan. They believe there will be one day when they can play with a korean team in an international match, and definitely take victory, and make the Koreans upset.

There is low, and then there is really low. Snatching victory from the hands of foreign kids is a new nadir even by Korean standards.

Koreans have made a propaganda video claiming that Liancourt Rocks (Dokdo) is historically Korean territory and that Japan’s territorial claims on the rocks are illegitimate, but that is simply not true. The video is full of lies, half-truths, and red-herring arguments, which I began pointing out in my first post on the issue here: Lies, Half-truths, & Dokdo Video, Part 1, where you can also watch the video.

In my first post on the issue, I used maps and quotes from Korean historical documents to show that the island Koreans are using to base their claim on Liancourt Rocks (Dokdo) was actually just a neighboring island of Ulleungdo. Korea’s own historical documents say that the island, “Usando,” was a neighboring island of Ulleungdo. They say that it was fertile, had trees and various plant life, and had people living on it. That is proof that Usando could not have been Liancourt Rocks (Dokdo) since Liancourt Rocks is just barren rocks with no trees, soil, or water to support a settlement.

To further emphasize the fact that Usando could not have been Liancourt Rocks (Dokdo), here is a Korean record from the Annals of King Sejo:

April 16, 1457, “Annals of King Sejo,” Vol. 7

First, former Jungchuwon Busa Yu Su-gang, wrote, “I will respectfully tell you what I saw and heard while I was the Gangneung Busa….”

1. “The people in Gangneung said, ‘The islands of Usando and Muleungdo are both suitable for settlements. There are an abundance of products that can be used for many things. There is nothing they do not have, including paper mulberry trees, mulberry, ramie, large bamboo, zither stick, “fish glue” trees, camellia, pine nut trees, pear trees, persimmons, Asiatic sparrow hawks, black sparrow hawks, laver, globefish, octopus, and sea otters.'”

“‘The land is so fertile that it produces ten times more grains than other regions. The distances from north-to-south and east-to-west are both about 50 ri, so people can settle there. The four sides of the island are rugged with cliffs that stand 1,000 gil high, but there are places for boats to anchor. If there is a wind blowing directly out of the west, you can leave Samcheok at between 1:30 and 2:30 a.m. and arrive at the island between 9:30 and 10:30 p.m., but if you use your oars with a light wind, then it will take one day and one night to arrive. If you use your oars with no wind, you can still get there in two days and one night.'”

“I prostrate myself and beg you to establish settlements and choose people to protect them.”

The king ordered the Byeongjo (council) to discuss the matter. The Byeongjo answered as follows:

Article 4: “Establishing settlements on the two islands of Usando and Muleungdo would be difficult because the sea route is dangerous and travel to and from there would be very difficult. Moveover, it would be very difficult to protect them because it is an isolated island.”

“For the above reasons and others, please do not issue an order (to establish settlements). Instead, since there are people from the province who travel to the island and temporarily live there, we request that we wait for calm winds and then send an official there to forcefully evict them. Please tell the inspector for that province to find other places to anchor the military vessels stuck in inlets clogged with sand and move them there.”

The king followed the advice, but did not forcefully evict the people travelling to and temporarily living on the two islands.

Notice that the record says that both Usando and Muleungdo (Ulleungdo) were suitable for settlements and that the islands had an abundance of plant and animal life, which included various kinds of trees. That means that Usando could not have been Liancourt Rocks because there is no soil for plants and trees, which makes it unsuitable for a settlement. Also, notice that the record again says that it was two days travel time to the two islands, just as the Chinese characters say on the bottom line connecting the two islands to the mainland on this 1710 Korean map. The above record is not unique, but one of many that show that Usando could not have been Liancourt Rocks (Dokdo).

The reason Koreans claim that Usando was Liancourt Rocks (Dokdo) is that without making such a claim, Korea would have no record or map before 1905 showing that she even knew about the rocks, much less claimed them. The problem is that there is nothing mentioned about Usando in Korean historical documents that would even suggest that Usando was Liancourt Rocks (Dokdo). On the contrary, all the evidence suggest that Usando was a neighboring island of Ulleungdo, most likely Jukdo, which is a small island less than four kilometers off Ulleungdo’s east coast.

Now that Nora has disappeared after I exposed ‘her’, there is no one around in the Korea related blogosphere to write about lesbian issues. I will make an attempt in true finger chopping wacky Occidentalism style.

Here is a story. A guy in New York tries to pick up a girl, fails, spits on the girl or one of her friends, and is then attacked by a group 7 of lesbians. Story courtesy of Gay.com (standard denial – I am not a regular reader of Gay.com).

Seven lesbians from Newark, N.J., attacked and seriously injured a street vendor in New York’s West Village early Friday after the man grew angry when his advances to one woman were not returned, the New York Daily News reported.

Police said the women whipped Wayne Buckle, 28, with belts; the subject of his attentions, Patreese Johnson, 19, then stabbed him repeatedly with a steak knife, the Daily News said.

I suspect these New York lesbians are a very tough breed (excuse the pun).

One of the women yelled “She’s my girl, and no one hits on my girl!” during the incident, a police source told the paper.

The lesbian that said that is definitely going to a womens prison. I thought the prison system was supposed to be punishment, not a reward.

“He made the mistake of spitting at one of them,” Diego Rodriguez, who works at a nearby newsstand and called 911, told the paper. “They beat him up bad with belts, kicked and punched him.”

Later, at the police station house, where the seven suspects, ranging in age from 18 to 31, were charged with gang assault and criminal possession of a weapon, another woman told the Daily News that Buckle “called us [homophobic slur] and he said he was going to f— us all.”

Said another: “He spit on us and threw a cigarette. This is a hate crime.”

Buckle was recovering at a New York hospital in critical but stable condition.

A “hate crime” indeed. After beating him senseless with belts, and stabbing him repeatedly with a knife, they were arrested a block away from the crime scene, according to WNBC News .That means they ran away from the crime scene – I dont know why the article just does not come out and say it.

An oxygen tube pumping air into his lungs, the 28-year-old man allegedly beaten and stabbed in the West Village by a gang of petite lesbians described the attack yesterday from his hospital bed.

“They hated men,” Wayne Buckle said from the intensive care unit of Saint Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan. “I think it would have been any man and not just me.”

Still shaken by Friday’s terrifying assault, Buckle, an independent filmmaker from Queens, said he felt he was the victim of a bias attack.

“It was a hate crime against a straight man by a ton of lesbians,” he said. “This is what the world is coming to.”

Several witnesses and police sources said Buckle sparked the attack by spitting on a 19-year-old lesbian after she rejected his advances outside the IFC movie theater on Sixth Ave. near W. Third St. He also allegedly cursed the woman, Patrice Johnson, using gay slurs.

Johnson and six of her friends – all lesbians from New Jersey – pounced on Buckle at 2 a.m., whipping him with belts before Johnson stabbed him repeatedly in the belly with a 4-inch serrated steak knife, authorities said.

Buckle was bleeding badly after the attack. He suffered multiple stab wounds to his stomach, and his face was bruised.

The seven suspects were arraigned early yesterday on charges of attempted murder, assault and gang assault. They were ordered held on $50,000 cash bail or $150,000 bond.

His eyes swollen, Buckle was hooked up to a respirator yesterday. He denied that he had provoked the attack and insisted he was not homophobic.

“All I said was, ‘Excuse me, how are you doing?’ like a gentleman,” he said. “I thought it was the natural thing to do.”

I dont know. It is hard to tell exactly what happened here, but it looks like the lesbians wanted to escalate the situation because they were clearly willing to use violence. Normal people do not just go out and stab people, even if they suffer considerable provocation. Being spit on is not enough provocation to beat and stab someone so badly they need to go on a respirator, in my opinion. If I were the NY police, I would be looking for a history of altercations with straight men by the perpetrators.

Leftist ideology causes South Korea’s regime to cultivate victimhood and resentment of a Japan imagined to have expansionism in its national DNA. The choice by China’s regime is more interesting. Marxism is bankrupt and causes cognitive dissonance as China pursues economic growth by markedly un-Marxist means. So China’s regime, needing a new source of legitimacy, seeks it in memories of resistance to Japanese imperialism.

Actually, most of China’s resistance was by Chiang Kai-shek’s forces, Mao’s enemies. And Mao, to whom there is a sort of secular shrine in Beijing, killed millions more Chinese than even Japan’s brutal occupiers did.

The museum adjacent to Yasukuni says “The Greater East Asian War” began because, when the New Deal failed to banish the Depression, “the only option open to Roosevelt . . . was to use embargoes to force resource-poor Japan into war. The U.S. economy made a complete recovery once the Americans entered the war.” That is disgracefully meretricious — and familiar. For years a small but vocal cadre of Americans — anti-FDR zealots — said approximately that. But neither Koizumi nor Abe includes the museum in his visits to the shrine.

Things are so bad that, speaking about the incessant incursions by Chinese submarines and military aircraft into Japanese sea and air spaces, a senior Japanese official casually made the startling suggestion that China’s regime, like Japan’s regime before the war, does not fully control its military.

The controversy about Yasukuni should not mystify Americans. With their comparatively minor but still acrimonious arguments about displays of Confederate flags, Americans know how contentious the politics of national memory can be, and they understand the problem of honoring war dead without necessarily honoring the cause for which they died.